The X-Files 2: Goblins
Charles Grant
Harper Prism pbk, 277 pgs; issued in the UK as a HarperCollins paperback
Review by Gerald Houghton (1994)
It's a tie-in for "America's boldest new TV series!" Boldest. Nothing about The X-Files is quite expected. It succeeds in piling a paranoid conspiracy week on week about little green men (sorry, E.B.E.s) and government cabals and cover-ups enough to have any self-respecting, flag-hoisting US citizen cowering behind the desk in the Oval Office. And yet its heroes are FBI agents. More often than not it manages to pull out of its bag of tricks surprisingly haunting -- creepy -- imagery, and yet is also extremely funny. Anyone who takes it all that seriously must surely have missed the bus. And keeping up with the number of movie homages in there is a full-time job. (Just how often can you remake The Silence of The Lambs?) Argue amongst yourselves how original it is; The X-Files is certainly bold.
Which brings us to this novel, based on characters created by Chris Carter. Tie-ins are, of course, essentially disposable things. How often do you get a real writer behind the pre-ordained word count? Ramsey Campbell sort of did it; God spare us, Shaun Hutson's done it; and best of all, Dennis Etchison called himself Jack Martin and did it several times (his Videodrome is a surprisingly sharp novel). Charles L. Grant is a real writer as well. He has awards to prove it, and a shelf groaning under the weight of over thirty novels, but there's little here to suggest it was done for anything other than the cheque; it's like the script for an okay episode of the series with the blank bits filled in.
The story is reasonably simple. People are being brutally killed in a small town in New Jersey, near the military base Fort Dix. The killer is spoken of in town as being a goblin because of its shadowy passing in the night, a deadly but unseen force. Mulder and Scully are dispatched, with two accompanying novice agents, by a new section head (alarm bells) to investigate. There are complications -- like family connections with a friend of Mulder's -- but it's all pretty straight-edge stuff that resolves itself as a fairly slack whodunit. At least the final showdown has a nice understatement, even if it lacks the ambiguity of the best of the TV series.
Let's be pedantic though and ask exactly why other FBIs accompany our redoubtable duo; their straightlaced methods offer nothing, not even a convincing contrast, to Mulder's more instinctive way with a case. (Still, if you think about it, maybe you can guess.) And it's perhaps a shame that, for the first in a proposed series, the book didn't latch itself onto a UFO storyline.
Better is Grant's ability to capture the pose of the TV show, especially its instinctive siding with the boy and not the girl. It's a boy show. He allows the novel to slip inside the thoughts of the agents, but it's all just reinforcement of a series of small screen mannerisms. These people don't exist in any meaningful way. They have no characters outside of what they do; they're not about to get any kind of a life soon. What further books need -- what the TV series hints towards -- is some kind of ongoing, building plotlines instead of being simply highly entertaining, highly episodic fluff.
And if all this is just a TV tie-in novel then why are we discussing it as though it's a real, grown-up book by a real, grown-up writer? Ah, now therein lays a real mystery of X-File proportions.